Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I screwed up. I missed a ton of screenings for this. My times kept getting conflicted, and now I’ve missed all the press screenings, and I’m irritated because this sounds like something worth seeing. Just means I’m seeing it the weekend it opens is all. Guess that’s not exactly a hardship. Still... reviews like this one get me anxious:
Hey Mori,
Wicker Man here with my review of "Secretary". This is a movie I'd been curious about for some time now. Anything with James Spader in it at least peaks my curiosity. He's made a career out of playing some memorable characters with a low-key creep factor (including a funny turn on "Seinfeld" that was, oddly, still somehow creepy), and Maggie Gyllenhaal is turning up in interesting movies like "Donnie Darko" or "Adaptation" that make me interested to know where she's going to go in her career. Going in, all I knew about the movie was that there was a big deal made about some S&M and that the poster depicted a skirted woman's bent-over bottom.
So what the hell is "Secretary"? Well, after clarifying it for myself, it seems to be, in a nutshell, a story about two types of repressed people who somehow free up in the midst of trying to be professional in a mannered business environment. It seems like it's more than that in some ways, and much less in others. Yeah, I know that's pretty vague, so I'll try to elaborate.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is Lee Holloway, a young woman who has just gotten out of a psychiatric hospital where she's been staying due to a penchant for self-inflicted wounds. Lee likes to cut herself, and sometimes burn herself in order to bring inner pain to the skin's surface. Lee's probable source of agony comes from a household consisting of an alcoholic father (Stephen McHattie), an annoying just-married sister (Amy Locane), and a overly-doting mother (Lesley Ann Warren). Immediately upon returning home to live with the family, Lee goes for some job training and subsequently interviews for a secretary job with a lawyer, E. Edward Grey (Spader). Right off the bat, one can sense that Grey is a little odd, a very insulated type of lawyer who seems to want to know a little too much about who he's hiring. Lee gets the job and from there starts into routine, learning the quirks of Grey's small but tightly-run office. Both seem somewhat distant from each other and offer little in the way of niceties, but at some point, though, Spader begins to glimpse of the results Lee's self-inflicted violence. He sees that Lee is holding, or held, back emotionally and intervenes by giving her some stern advice to follow. In trying to tailor her work errors, some of Grey's own demons soon come into play as he begins to employ his own preferred methods of office discipline. A shocking spanking session which should repulse Lee actually opens her eyes to some new possibilities about herself. Their relationship begins to evolve into a different beast, an unspoken sexual flirtation which includes the aforementioned S&M element. To Lee, this "relationship" actually makes her fledgling, more conventional relationship with a none-too-bright suitor, Peter, (Jeremy Davies) seem boring. I don't want to say how it all resolves, but where the movie goes I can't say I would have expected.
What I like about this movie is that it doesn't condemn its characters and that things we're used to feeling uncomfortable about (masochism, fetishism) are explored with some wry humor. I don't think "Secretary" is entirely successful, but it's not entirely typical, either. The biggest problem with the movie is that it's a got a slow, deliberate pace that, at nearly two hours, seems to linger too much on the long road to a conclusion. Luckily, there are performances to really dig into. The movie could have really gone into some Joe Esterhazs territory but thankfully that's not what the director/co-writer Steven Shainberg has in mind. Ultimately, for these characters, the way they interact, however morally off-putting it may seem to many, is the only way for them to feel like whole individuals. It's more Solondz than Esterhazs if anything. For some reason, my enjoyment of the movie somehow brought me back to "The Big Kahuna", another intimate movie about conflicting personalities in which the character acting trumped the actual story. What I enjoyed most, there, as I do here, was watching the actors. You love watching these actors sink their teeth into these roles, knowing how much fun they must be having under these controlled performances. This is simply the kind of challenge actors' actors like to present themselves. While Spader gives a strong, nuanced performance as a man who is essentially torn between being professional and indulging his "deviant" behavior, Maggie Gyllenhaal simply shines in the role of Lee. This is a character who communicates more with her face and small gestures than with heaps of dialogue. This is a part that requires Gyllenhaal to become progressively uninhibited, to be goofy, frumpy, despaired, confused, but all the while, sexy and very sexual. She really succeeds. As an emerging mainstream American actress, taking on this kind of provocative role, not unlike the way Jennifer Connolly made everyone's eyes open wide with "Requiem for a Dream", both invigorates and fucks with the notion of a what a star should be.
I think as a movie, "Secretary" is worth a look, even if it's a video rental. Yes, I have many reservations about it, and it could've been a somewhat shorter film, but with actors I like and a filmmaker involved in a labor of love, that's at least enough to get me to watch.
The Wicker Man
Not a rave, but a damn solid review, and there’s enough about that to make me curious now.
"Moriarty" out.
